The present disclosure relates to a method and system for dynamically allocating agents during outbound calling in a system for facilitating call connections between a user and a target. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, references will be made to examples of applications for making sales calls. However, one of ordinary skill in the art will understand that the concepts described herein are applicable to any number of different fields, including, but not limited to, any contact relationship management system, telephone surveys, telephone number verification, census information gathering activities, fund raising campaigns, or any combination thereof.
An automated system for telephonically conducting simultaneous calling sessions on behalf of many users incurs ongoing labor costs due to the need for human agents to facilitate various parts of the calling process, such as navigating IVR trees, asking gatekeepers to transfer calls to prospects, detecting voice mail messages, and identifying prospects for final transfer to the calling user. An example of an automated system for facilitating telephone call connections between a user and a prospect is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2007/0121902 A1, published May 31, 2007, entitled TRANSFER OF LIVE CALLS, based upon application Ser. No. 11/556,301, filed Nov. 3, 2006, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
At many points during a call, such as when a phone is ringing or an IVR message is playing, the agent is effectively idle while the labor cost is still being incurred. The agent is also idle while the conversation is taking place between the calling user and the target. In addition, the agent is also idle after the conversation ends, during the period of time that the calling user may be taking notes, logging the call, or setting up follow-up activities. In addition, there may be times during a calling session when the calling user simply takes a break. In all these cases, excess labor costs are incurred for idle agents, and these costs adversely impact the gross profit margin of any business engaged in providing such calling sessions. The gross profit margin ultimately constrains pricing flexibility and restricts business model choices.
Additionally, if the system offers a guarantee or attempts to achieve a goal of a defined number of good connections during a session or defined period of time, it is desirable to be able to dynamically increase or decrease the total amount and quality of agent resources applied to any given session, depending on factors such as the calculated quality of the calling list, actual and historical rates at which connections are being made during the calling session, or to satisfy specific business requirements such as achieving a faster connection rate during a demonstration of the system, or testing the relationship of agent resource levels or agent skill levels to connection rates.
Finally, there may be a requirement to provision agents with specific skills, such as understanding or speaking a given language, to certain calling sessions. The labor costs associated with agents having different skills varies according to the skills. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to apply agents with an optimal skill level to execute all or part of any given call attempt within a calling session, so that lower skilled, less expensive agents can be utilized for activities commensurate with their skill level, without being required to commit for the entire duration of the calling session highly skilled, more expensive agents to execute other parts of the process that do not require a specific high value skill (at a higher labor cost).
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved automated calling system that allows an optimal set of agents to be pooled and dynamically assigned to different calling sessions on a just-in-time basis. A system that dynamically allocates agents by assigning the lowest cost agent available to perform a particular task at the moment that the task needs to be performed can increase gross profit margin by eliminating time that is wasted by having agents idle during various steps in the process, and by eliminating the high cost of more expensive, higher skilled agents during intervals of time in the calling session where their skills are not required. An improvement in automated calling systems that increases gross profit margin is of crucial importance, because of the constraining effect that gross profit margin has on pricing flexibility and available business model choices.